Accidents Happen
by DK
Summary: Spoilers for PW2C4  when Gumshoe holds the key to convicting the culprit, it's up to Franziska to find him. Surprisingly, she doesn't mind hunting her favorite victim. A slightly sweet story about a slightly scary sadist.


Accidents Happen

a Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney fanfic

by DK

Gumshoe was an unforgivably foolish son of a foolish bitch.

Los Angeles baked beneath a merciless afternoon sun. At night, the city was an old woman trying to hide its flaws under layers of glittering make-up. By day, it reminded Franziska von Karma more of a corpse swelling in the sun, ugly and awkward and growing ever more bloated. A legion of parasites in SUVs and clumsy American autos swarmed over the city's vile surface, and as her Benz darted through the clumps of traffic creeping up I-710, Franziska found herself wishing she could knock them aside with a sweep of her fist.

Spring was only beginning to ease timidly into summer, but the heat that welled up from the blacktop made the air hot and breathless, and the air conditioner on her Benz had gone _kaputt_ last week. She drove with the windows down, warm, dry air blasting over her face and causing her eyes to water. She didn't blink, didn't stop, didn't even slow down. Time was running out, Matt Engarde needed to be put away, and God help them all, Gumshoe had crashed somewhere with the crucial evidence on his pathetic person.

Franziska's mind bubbled over with rage as she slammed a foot down on the accelerator, swerving around a sluggish green minivan. A sticker on the van's rear bumper proclaimed that its owner's foul spawn was AN HONOR STUDENT AT ELK RIDGE JR HIGH, and it was all she could do to keep herself from screaming to a stop in front of the van, pulling out the driver, and lashing them into unconsciousness.

_She_ had become a prosecutor when she was thirteen and she was damn hard to impress and no sticker was going to win her over with its deranged, foolish bleating of perceived superiority. The very idea that such monumental stupidity not only existed but was willing to display itself both ostentatiously and unselfconsciously was so offensive that she felt the bile rise in the back of her throat and this was all goddamn Gumshoe's fault, that stupid bastard, that fool of a fool of a tool-

The transmitter sitting askew in her cup holder gave a warbling, plaintive little tweet, and she wanted to hit it too. Still, the sparks of rage it and the driver ignited were unbelievably insignificant, astonishingly unimportant, infinitesimally inconsequential compared to the raging, towering inferno of fury that Gumshoe had set aflame. To think he could do this to her even _after_ she fired him--!

There was no time to slow down or turn around; Franziska took the exit at a barely legal speed, her speedometer needle hovering a fraction beneath the limit, her turn signal blazing on and just as quickly off as she slipped across several lanes of traffic.

The lunch rush had already ended, and the afternoon stampede wouldn't begin for a few hours, which meant that L.A's traffic was as reasonable as it ever got and still completely, hopelessly insane. Franziska threaded her way around a stretch limo, a pick-up truck groaning with sheets of drywall, and an obese man on a motorcycle who thrust a pair of middle fingers up at her as she swerved around him.

She swore in German, noting his license number for later. She was used to the speed and precision of the _Autobahn_, not this nest of madness where mental retardation was obviously no barrier to obtaining a license. A storm of blaring horns surrounded her as she darted through the horde, exiting the interstate and snaking into the suburbs north of the downtown.

If anyone _else_ had been driving, she might have been nervous.

The transmitter beeped again, louder, and she took a left, sliding the wheel hard enough to cause a painful jolt in her shoulder. The bullet had gone through clean, and hadn't slowed her down at all - she'd still had the energy to take a metal hospital tray to an orderly she heard joking about the von Karma penchant for being shot in the shoulder - but it still hurt when she moved her arm, a grinding, brittle pain like broken glass scraping over pavement, the loose pieces of bone and muscle working painfully against each other.

Another thing she probably owed to Gumshoe's bumbling - if she thought about it long enough, she was sure she could marshal enough blame that he might as well have done the deed himself.

And she had been looking forward to the rare quiet afternoon...

Franziska had just finished drawing a bath and lowering herself into it, had just closed her eyes, had just begun to feel her muscles start to loosen up and slough off some of the ache that had been creeping into them over the days since Mi- _Edgeworth_ had taken over her case against Engarde. Not that he would win without her help, of course - it had been this fact, as much as anything, that had tempered her anger after she had leapt out of the bath and taken his call, that had sent her racing after Gumshoe, who held the key to cracking the case and destroying Engarde once and for all.

Smelling blood, she had thrown on the first things she could find - a pair of sandals, some loose shorts, and worst of all, an old t-shirt from her mid-teen years that had been transformed by time and blissful forgetfulness into utter enigma. A hideous dog dominated the center, its face lost in a tangle of velvety wrinkles. Bright pink letters marching across a white background below it proclaimed: _**SHAR-PEI!**_

If Franziska hadn't been so convinced of her own intrinsic sex appeal, she might have thought that she looked ridiculous. Fortunately, she always kept an extra change of clothes in the car.

Annoyed as she was at the interruption, she couldn't say it was entirely bad. For one thing, it vindicated her judgment of the worthless detective - not that she had been questioning that, of course. For another, her role in the victory would serve as something to rub into the insufferable Phoenix Wright's face. She would see him beaten, she would see him crumple, she would see him _cry-_

She stilled her heavy, rasping breath with effort. That wasn't the most important thing, pleasant though it would be.

Most importantly, a von Karma always got her man, always pursued her sense of justice to the bitter end. And if she happened to find Gumshoe strewn across several meters of highway in the process, well, she would consider that an early Christmas present.

Franziska smiled tightly, predatory and beautiful no matter what she might be wearing, wet hair plastered against her forehead, neck and armpits and thighs still dripping from the bath, and suddenly loved her life and everything in it.

As she cut across the back lot of a school, undoubtedly full of worthless bumper-sticker stars, the tracker gave a long, sustained beep. She was getting closer to the site of the accident. The accident?

_There are no accidents_, her father had told her when she was a child, looking down on her with a face like a carved stone idol. She had been tall for her age, but he had towered over her like a god, and she had treated his words with all the reverence of an Old Testament prophet. She had only nodded, fighting to hold back her tears, when he continued: _There are only mistakes, yours or someone else's, and someone must always pay for them in the end._

Franziska had only been six at the time, running around in revolting long skirts and saddle shoes, but her father had known her well enough to know she would understand. She had pushed a kitchen chair against the counter and clambered atop it to get to the cookie jar, a great, monstrous, ugly thing of glazed clay that her mother had made ages ago. There weren't any cookies in it and there hadn't been since she was born, but Franziska had known as much - she'd only wanted to see, infected with the strain of tenacious curiosity that would manifest itself years later as a determination to prosecute anyone who fell into her sights until they screamed for mercy.

When he came running after the titanic crash, he found her crouching on the edge of the counter, looking down at the ruined shards of the jar, her lip trembling. She'd protested, before she could think to stop herself, that it had just been an _accident_, that was all, and a fury descended upon him like nothing else she had seen in her young life.

She was neither stupid nor deaf - she'd overheard the water cooler talk and the breakroom whispers. People who were supposed to be her colleagues or friends. People who were supposed to give her respect. They talked about how abuse begat abuse, how her father must have slapped her until her brains rattled, until she couldn't understand people, until she could do nothing but lash out with a violence that only her professional genius could excuse.

But it didn't matter what those people said. It didn't matter what papa had done to Edgeworth. It didn't matter that she hadn't read that letter he sent her, hadn't even been there when they- when they- He had been a good father, and had never hit her, never even given her the idea that such a thing might be possible.

His cold disapproval was almost worse. She had felt it for the first time that day, and she had known that what he said was true. It hadn't been an accident that she dropped the jar - she hadn't been paying enough attention, too busy conjuring fantasies of a woman she'd only seen in pictures and fuzzy, idiotic dreams. She hadn't been attentive enough, and now one more piece of her mother was gone forever.

It might have been that day more than any other that had set her on the path to being a prosecutor. That had made her understand the need for perfection. She had learned. She no longer had accidents. She no longer made mistakes.

Franziska grunted in frustration as the beeping faded away, and she wrenched the wheel around, sending another painful jolt through her shoulder. If she didn't know that he was so damned incompetent, she would swear that scruffy bastard was doing this to her on _purpose._ His mistakes would be the death of him, one day.

_Maybe they just were_, a nasty little voice in the back of her mind whispered. Franziska felt a rush of heat come to her face, a burst of savage approval - and a soft tickling of shame. She quieted it.

It wasn't as if she owed him anything. She had tried to teach him. She had really _tried_, and he should have been grateful.

She had known Gumshoe was a bumbling disaster of a human being from the first moment she had met him. It had been at her Welcome Party, a ghastly affair that had involved not only the other prosecutors but a veritable cornucopia of incompetent plebes from the LAPD. They had held it in _her_ new office without even asking, the punch had been bad, and the dangling police badge decorations even worse, but she had bitten back the desire to tell whoever had organized it to go to hell. She wasn't sure what to think of papa these days, but whatever he had done, he had taught her that first impressions counted.

And so, mentally gritting her teeth, she had made small talk about German cuisine, politely pretended to care about the drama surrounding fallen star Lana Skye, endured the clumsy come-ons of no less than three sloppy detectives, all of them old enough to be her father, and listened to that pathetic old fossil Payne going on about how he'd once tried a prominent defense attorney for murder.

She had nodded and exclaimed at the right times and even managed a smile or two, and she had refrained from lashing about her with her whip for nearly an hour. All in all, she had been a paragon of self-control and self-restraint, and then that imbecile had staggered into her without even the excuse of being drunk, and then there was punch running down her legs and pooling in her boots, and then he had shrugged and said, _Sorry, pal._

She had smiled then, cold rage all but riming her teeth in frost, and thought: _You're mine._

Oh, and she had paid him back for that one. And the one after, and the one after, and all the other stupid mistakes that he had made, often masquerading as accidents. She knew better, and she had tried to teach him, harder than she'd tried to teach anyone, and she still didn't know why.

He spilled coffee on her desk, and she whipped him across the shoulders. He messed up the chalk outline at a crime scene and she gave his face a sharp, ringing slap. He misplaced the SL-17 files and she had him run around the fitness track with the box held above his head, chasing him every step of the way, whip snapping at the air.

She only wanted him to be better. To stop having accidents that were nothing but mistakes, which he and the rest of the department had to pay for. He never learned, no matter how hard she tried, no matter how brutal her treatments became. It grew into something that almost resembled a game - she could not call it cat and mouse because she didn't credit him with the cunning of a mouse. Still, in her own small way, she had enjoyed it.

It had been a waste, a worthless and foolish expenditure of time on a foolish fool who foolishly refused to open his foolish ears. Oh well, at least hitting him was fun, and he bore it with a certain quiet resignation she could appreciate. In fact-

Franziska slammed on the brake, bringing her car to a stop on the shoulder. Behind her, the blaring horns of downtown and the sprawl had faded away. The long, winding goose chase had taken her halfway across Alhambra, and she had drifted so far north she was damn near in Pasadena. If she had to go much further, she'd never get back downtown in time.

The thought of Wright victorious, scratching the back of his head and smiling like a mongoloid with a new toy was enough to drive her forward. She hesitated only a moment, looking dubiously down at the Shar-Pei, before violently throwing the door open and stepping outside.

She stood on a pathetic belt of nature crammed between two of the dozens of ugly little towns this big ugly city had eaten up. Ahead of her, a suburb scrubby enough to remind her of Gumshoe stretched out, rows of faux-adobe houses marching in hideous ranks up a series of low hills. She still wasn't used to the city's gaudiness, not after the elegance of Heidelberg, the long sweeping vistas of the _Philosophenweg_ and the old_ Schloss_. L.A. didn't feel like home. But then, it wasn't - she was here to win a battle, not settle in, and the sooner she started looking for Gumshoe, the sooner she would find victory.

In the car behind her, the detector lapsed into a loud, steady whine, but she didn't need it any longer; ahead of where she had stopped, a pair of ugly black skid marks swerved across both lanes and into a small but thick patch of woods on the right side of the road. Gumshoe hadn't even hit anything, it seemed, just lost control of his car because he had tried to turn too fast.

_At least he hasn't killed anyone else with his stupidity,_ Franziska thought, slamming the car door. A sudden rush of wind plastered her wet hair across her eyes and she irritably fished it out. _Not that the driver of that van would be a huge loss._

She grabbed her cell phone and dialed in the location, knowing that an ambulance would arrive soon. It was just as well that they had called her - likely no one who hadn't been in the area at the time would have even known Gumshoe had wrecked.

Franziska wasn't looking forward to poking around in the undergrowth with water dripping from under her shorts and a Shar-Pei perching on her breasts, but she had been through worse; on the Mackie Messer case she'd gone crawling around on hands and knees in the sewers of Mannheim without missing a beat. _Mannheim!_

"This better be worth it, Scruffy," she grumbled, shoving the first of the branches out of the way. If it was another one of his typically asinine leads, she would throttle him herself.

A few minutes later, she had decided to throttle him anyway.

The thicket was a mess, one of those horrible little clumps of wilderness that suburbs both resented and tried to desperately to cling to. She doubted it had seen pruning or clean-up in ten years, and it seemed as if nature was all too eager to take the neglect out on her. Twigs and branches tore at her arms and legs like living things, striking bloody lines across her pale skin. As she followed the car's rough trail through the underbrush, she found herself descending into a steep gully, strewn with ankle-turning rocks and roots. She slipped slightly and realized she had stepped on a used condom, and why hadn't she taken the time to put on regular shoes, why, why, _why-_

Her breath caught painfully in her throat. She coughed and shuddered, as if her body was shocked at its own reaction, and she was distantly, obliquely grateful that no one was around to see the blood drain from her face.

Gumshoe's car was as pathetic as she had always expected it to be, a battered old Ford Pinto with rust spots and a duct-taped antenna and a flaking paint job in a color that an old college roommate of Franziska's had once described as "baby-shit brown." As bad as it must have been before, one could hardly say that its trip down the gully had been an improvement. Midway down, the car had crashed directly into a tree, bending around it like soft taffy. The front fender and hood had crumpled backwards, shattering the windshield into a million jagged pieces. As the car's momentum carried it downward, the tree had torn deeper, sloughing away metal and rubber along the driver's side.

It seemed as if the car had somehow _unzipped_, and the tangle of Gumshoe's possessions that spilled from it - the battered fedora that must go with his jacket, a K-Mart bag full of assorted rubbish, and a broken piece of plywood that looked to have once been the Blue Badger's head - looked as obscene as the entrails overflowing from the burst belly of a corpse.

_A corpse..._

"Scruffy?" She heard herself ask, her voice coming dangerously close to wavering. Light dappled the shattered car through the leaves of the trees. Birds twittered. Nature went on, oblivious and happy, and she was suddenly afraid that Gumshoe was dead and she didn't like the way it felt and she was mad at herself for being afraid and mad at Gumshoe for being an idiot and mad at the universe for ever forcing him into her path and -

"Gumshoe!" She shouted now, trying to drown out her uncertainty, the furious thudding of her heart. "Scruffy!" And finally, "Dick!"

It wasn't the first time she had called him that, but it was the first time she had used his name. Nothing in the gully seemed to care. The birds squawked angrily, rising from the trees in complaining flocks. Gumshoe did not answer.

_He's never going to answer you, Franziska. He's dead. Just like you told him, his stupidity finally caught up with him, and if you were so damn right why aren't you satisfied right now?_

She felt something stinging her eyes, and later she would reflect that she wasn't sure what she might have done if she hadn't turned around, taken one lurching step towards his car, and seen him. He lay sprawled face down on the ground on the opposite slope of the gully, motionless, his coat tangled in a nearby bush like a dead thing.

Franziska didn't remember moving, didn't remember much of anything until she was kneeling beside him, scratching her knees all to hell on the brambles. Some part of her, nurtured on first aid summer classes in her not-so-distant youth, told her she shouldn't move him. She didn't listen to it. She had to see. She had to know.

She turned him over with a gentleness she wouldn't have believed she could show him, all but cradling his head in her lap. He looked so different, so uncommonly pathetic, almost naked without that smelly old coat. Her fingers slipped through his hair, and came away sticky and red with blood, there was so much, his skull must be crushed, he must be dead, there was so _much-_

_I didn't want this,_ she thought, her stomach churning. His eyes closed peacefully, his mouth slack, Gumshoe might have been asleep - as she had discovered him on duty several times, to his extreme discomfort. She desperately wanted it to be like that now, wanted to whip him awake and hear him yelp, the way he always did, almost cute in its patheticness.

She loathed his slovenliness, his clumsiness, his general oafishness. But she hadn't wanted him to be hurt, not unless she was the one to do it. She hadn't wanted him to die.

"Damn you," she snarled at him, for being audacious enough to be dead.

Sadness tried to rise in her, but she pressed it down, unfamiliar with its soft, sloppy edges, unable to grasp it as part of her wanted. Anger was there too, white-hot and urgent, and it was easier. It was always easier. Gumshoe had been _hers_ to torment. It wasn't the world's place to smash him up, break him down, and send him home. It was the sole responsibility of Franziska von Karma, and she always got her man.

She looked down into his still, dead face, her heart giving a painful lunge, straining against its bonds of tendon and bone like one of her racing stallions surging over the finish line. The world didn't know how to do it right. It didn't know how to punish him like she did, it had done it too hard, and now he was broken. If she hated him so much, why did she feel like a part of her was broken, too?

"Stupid," she grunted, biting down on her lower lip, rocking back and forth in the dappled sunshine. She tried not to think of what a foolishly foolish frightened fool she must look, wearing a foolish shirt and cradling a foolish corpse. A shudder swept across her body at the last thought like the shadow of a cloud passing overhead, followed by a fresh burst of anger. She had been near plenty of dead bodies - poked them, prodded them, cut them open a couple of times - but never someone she... knew.

_Did you look like this in the end too, papa?_

Franziska felt her hands wanting to tremble and clenched her fingers in his hair to steady them. The low groan that emerged from his mouth nearly made her jump out of her skin. But she hadn't jumped when the cookie jar had shattered, or when Mackie's knife had pierced her calf in the reeking darkness, or when the bullet had tunneled through her shoulder, leaving burned and bleeding ruin in its wake. If she had acted like a foolish, scared little girl over something Gumshoe had done, she never would've forgiven herself.

If she had been anyone else, Franziska might have taken a moment to decide what to say. She might have been gentle, or hesitant, or the slightest bit yielding. She might have ruined everything.

"Scruffy!" she snapped, in the same tone she used when he misfiled a case brief or when lecturing a dog that had wet on the rug. She felt her heart lurch again, beating a vicious drumbeat in her temples. Blood had rushed to her face at some point during her foolish vigil over his body; the flush of sudden anger that surged through her masked it neatly. Anger was always easier. "Stop sleeping on the job!"

"Uhnnn... whaaa...?" He opened his eyes, blinked once, and closed them again, smacking his mouth loudly and yawning like he always did every time he was suddenly awoken at his desk. She had gotten so good at the timing that she could usually land the first stroke of her whip just as his mouth opened fully, producing a sudden pained squawk like a parrot being run over.

Even the thought ignited a small, hot spark of pleasure behind her eyes, but he'd been punished enough for now.

_More damage than I ever would have done,_ a smug, satisfied voice announced in her mind, recovering from its stunned silence. _I just give him what he needs._ Almost, she felt herself wanting to blush again. Almost.

"Don't try to move, you imbecile!" She snarled instead, her hands tightening on his shoulders and holding him down as he tried to rise. He fell back with a grunt, the motion kicking up a swirl of dead leaves. Then he was speaking again, actual words this time, thick and blurred and even more incoherent than usual.

"...evidence... Maya... gotta get... Engarde... de Killer..."

_Mein Gott! The evidence!_

It was the first time, she realized, that the thought of the evidence had occurred to her since she had seen him. She imagined her father's reproving glare, his unspoken accusation, and tried to think of how she would even begin to explain the lapse. It was one hell of a mistake, and it didn't matter that no one had been there to see it. She knew, and that was enough.

One more thing Scruffy could pay for later.

"Where is it?" Her eyes darted through the undergrowth, coming to rest on the Blue Badger's severed head. If the evidence had been destroyed like all the other junk in the car, she'd... well, she didn't know what she'd do, but _he_ wouldn't be very happy about it.

"Coat..." Gumshoe blinked again, groaning, struggling to rise. Franziska held him down with a single finger on his chest, lunging over him to tear the ratty garment free from the entangling bush. In the process, she realized that she had given Gumshoe a lot more personal contact than she'd given most men in her life, but it wasn't like he was in a position to enjoy it at the moment.

And if he did, that just meant he had better taste than his choice of clothing, aftershave, cologne, and car would suggest.

Franziska rifled through the coat like a common criminal, dislodging a flood of poorly wrapped and mostly melted menthol cough drops, caked with pieces of shredded up tissue. By the time her fingers encountered a wet wad of what had to be used chewing gum, she had already promised herself four scalding hot showers this afternoon.

"I... hate... this... stupid... coat!" she screamed, turning it inside out so violently that she sent another button spiraling off into the undergrowth. Distantly, she heard Gumshoe give another moan, as if she had injured him with the gesture.

She found them in the inside pocket: four clear evidence baggies, one strained to capacity by some kind of uniform, another containing a small but heavy gun, another with a video tape, and one with some kind of stupid _card_. Franziska stowed them back away with a frustrated grunt. She'd seen children come up with better evidence than this. Hell, she'd _been_ a child who had come up with better evidence than this.

"Is this all there is?" She demanded, shaking the coat as if she were trying to cure it of a case of hysteria. Limp sleeves flopped and dangled like dead limbs, and she saw the barely conscious Gumshoe cringe back at the abuse, blinking himself into wakefulness.

"Yeah..." he said, forcing himself into a sitting position. He scrubbed at his hair with a massive, clumsy hand, grimacing when it came away wet and red. "Just the four things... hope they... uhh... help... h-hey..."

He raised his arm, turning it palm outward so she could see the blood sliding down the heel of his hand. "Am I dying or somethin'?"

"No. Scalps bleed prodigiously, Scruffy." Something twisted in her stomach, and it felt sickeningly like relief. "Especially one as foolish as yours. With your undersized brain, your skull must be filled with a surplus amount of blood."

"Oh." He lowered his hand, staring past it at her, his head cocked to one side. It caused a thin finger of crimson to slide down his forehead, but he didn't seem to notice.

He had never looked at her like that before, Franziska realized. His face had always been marked by fear, or, more rarely, by the sullen, clumsy, plodding emotion that he tried to pass off as anger.

This was... well, she couldn't identify it, but whatever it was, she was absolutely certain that it wasn't supposed to ignite another of those little sparks somewhere deep inside. She wondered if he'd look at her like that after she'd smacked him around for an hour or so, and found herself hoping that the answer would be-

_That's enough,_ she thought, uprooting the idea before it could blossom. Aloud, she snarled, "What are you looking at?"

"Uh..." Gumshoe blinked, scratching at the back of his neck in a gesture that reminded her far too much of the insufferable Wright. "Well... Miss von Karma..." He hesitated for a moment, and then it emerged in a clumsy, addled rush:

"That's a really dumb shirt, pal."

"_WHAT?_"

And despite everything, despite her ironclad patience, her mature understanding that Gumshoe's punishment at her hands _would _come as surely as the sun rose and set, and her very real awareness that he probably had a concussion and God only knew what else wrong with him already, Franziska was certain that she would have killed him in that moment if she hadn't heard the wail of the approaching ambulance.

Gumshoe had thrown an arm over his face at her shout, awaiting his fate gamely if not bravely. He yelped when her fingers curled around his elbow, but by the time she pulled him to his feet, he had been reduced to staring at her incredulously.

"I wouldn't be wearing this shirt if a certain fool had managed to keep the foolish hunk of scrap he foolishly called a car on the foolish road." Gumshoe blinked, eyes glassy. "Stop looking at the Shar-Pei!"

"I don't even know what a Shar-Pei is, pal!" Gumshoe protested weakly. He lurched against her grip as if he wanted to run away, but barely made it a step before noticing the ruins of his car and staggering with a moan of dismay.

"Moron," Franziska said briskly, catching him before he could fall and throwing his massive arm over her shoulder. The detective dwarfed her, but she knew she was strong enough to get him back up to the road. Above, the ambulance's wail grew louder and louder. "I know the request is akin to asking the water not to be so wet, but if you stop being stupid, and lean on me, we'll be out of here much quicker. And for your information if you bleed on this... 'ugly' shirt, you have bought it."

They made their way up the hill with clumsy, lurching strides, a pair of mismatched children in the world's ugliest three-legged race. Franziska couldn't count the number of times Gumshoe's big clumsy feet led them to near disaster. It was as if some higher power had designed them to seek out every treacherous stone and root. Halfway up the slope she realized his aftershave smlled like a peppermint that had been floating around in a urinal, and his gasps for breath reminded her of a dying walrus, and the whiskers on the side of his face scraped her jaw raw, and worst of all he had had the temerity to bleed on her shirt after she had commanded him not to.

She smiled tightly, predatory and beautiful, and thought about how she would put him through the wringer next.

The loudspeaker crackles, and as the pilot announces that they are passing over Nevada, Franziska reflects that she never did get around to punishing Gumshoe.

She leans back in her seat, stretching her arms above her head and kicking up the foot rest. She had been forced to book a seat at the last minute, of course, but she had been smart enough to go to the airline desk in person. It hadn't taken much to secure her spot in first class; the flashing of a prosecutor's badge, a feral grin, the hiss of a whip uncoiling to the floor. Most people knew better than to refuse her in person.

_Even Scruffy..._

She looks down at her lap, where his filthy coat lies draped across her slim thighs like some clumsy attempt at propriety, and wonders just what the hell she's doing with it. She can't quite admit it, not even to herself, but when she handed him off to the paramedics, she had expected to see him again. As soon as she made sure nothing in his swollen cranium was broken, she could give it the thrashing it deserved.

The feat of acrobatics she had performed in order to change back into her prosecutor's uniform while screaming through traffic on her way to court had been truly legendary. Even now, she could recall only pieces of it, isolated and brilliant like scattered diamonds: pulling on a glove with her teeth, yanking her shorts from under her skirt while changing lanes, and putting the final touches on her ascot as she hopped the curb in front of the courthouse, reversing at over sixty kilometers per hour into an empty parking place without missing a beat.

She had been powerful, she had been glorious. She had stormed into the courtroom with all the beauty and majesty of one of Wagner's Valkyries, and she had watched Engarde shatter, literally tearing himself to pieces. She had tasted victory for the first time in an eternity, and she had waited for Mi- _Edgeworth_ and Phoenix Wright to acknowledge it, to admit her superiority once and for all.

And then- Wright had actually laughed, as if he didn't understand he had lost, and Edgeworth had smiled that infuriating smile at him, and she had felt ten years old again, lost and uninvited, sitting back at home and kicking her heels while papa took Miles to one of his law galas and introduced him to the big names in the business. She could never get Miles to tell her what had happened; he had only smiled and told her she would soon know.

Nearly ten years later, she still doesn't understand, but she is beginning to think that whatever Edgeworth did on those little trips permanently damaged his brain. Why else would he trust his enemy? Why else would he taint the joy of victory with an alliance with the defense? And Wright... a man who would sell out his own client, who would dare to turn her joy into anger...

She knows will never understand. If she ever becomes deluded enough that what Edgeworth said to her makes sense, she'll be worse off than Scruffy...

_Scruffy._

_He's probably eating dinner with them right now, the bastard_, she thinks, slamming a fist down on the coat.

She truly doesn't remember packing it, but she hadn't been paying the best of attention, consumed by a barely contained rage that had sent her racing out of the court like hell itself was on her heels. She had already begun to feel the first stirrings of the shameful tears that Edgeworth would coax out of her hours later while she packed, angrily throwing clothes almost at random into a suitcase. She supposed that was how the coat had gotten in there, nothing but an accident.

_There are no accidents, _she hears her father's voice coming through all the long years, from beyond the grave. _There are only mistakes, yours or someone else's, and someone must always pay for them in the end._

Had Edgeworth's cornering of her, her tears, her shame, been payment for her mistake?

Looking down at the thing on her lap, pathetic and reeking of his aftershave, it was hard to say she would have chosen to keep it deliberately. But she suddenly found herself glad of the accident that had spared it and delivered it into her hands. It was a symbol of someone and something she understood. Someone who didn't question her. Someone who would never push her till she broke, never make her lose control of hot, angry tears. She wanted it with her, now, when so much else that she had believed in had changed.

_Maybe you were wrong, papa,_ Franziska thinks, running a gloved hand over the coat. _Maybe everything that occurs outside your control doesn't have to be someone's mistake._

_Maybe... accidents happen. Maybe that's not always the worst thing in the world. _

She had told Edgeworth she was going to throw it away. Well, this wasn't the first time she had lied to him, and it probably wouldn't be the last.

Having stumbled into a fortunate accident, she wasn't going to ruin things with a deliberate mistake.

She smooths the coat flat on her lap and then folds it double, again, and again, until she has a flat square of fabric exactly the right size for a pillow. She tucks it underneath her head in the cramped airline seat, leaning back and closing her eyes. The stale, hissing breath of the plane's pathetically small cooling vent washes over her, probing at her face softly, and she feels the first gentle stirrings of sleep creeping near.

_Don't think being half a world away will save you from me, Mr. Scruffy Detective..._

She smiles softly, drowsy and gentle, the smell of him heavy in the air, the phantom crack of a whip echoing in her mind as she drifts away.

The End

A/N: Yeah, von Karma has problems. This is what happens when a sadist tries to be sweet. Von Karma, I mean, not me, though my fics are usually pretty sadistic. I have a couple other PW ideas floating around that may get written up sometime.


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